Bilateral Intelligence Cooperation: Theory Development Within the ‘Missing Dimension’ of International Politics
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of Document: BILATERAL INTELLIGENCE COOPERATION: THEORY DEVELOPMENT WITHIN THE ‘MISSING DIMENSION’ OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS Ryan E. Bock, PhD, 2012 Directed By: Professor George Quester, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland-College Park Bilateral intelligence cooperation has received increased attention in recent years, thanks in part to its publicly acknowledged role in supporting sovereign states in their efforts to counter transnational threats. Until recently most of the scholarship on this topic has been descriptive and atheoretical, with a tendency to treat known examples of cooperation as unique occurrences, rather than as instances of a broader phenomenon. The aversion to theory surrounding bilateral intelligence cooperation has inhibited efforts to develop generalized and contingent explanations about it, such as why it occurs in the first place and under what conditions it is most likely to flourish and atrophy. This dissertation seeks to address these gaps in the Intelligence Studies literature by leveraging insights from two theoretical traditions from International Relations—the dyadic democratic peace and relational contracting perspectives—to develop candidate explanations of why certain pairs of states engage in greater degrees of intelligence cooperation over time than others. Two historical case studies—the Anglo-Soviet and Anglo-American military intelligence relationships during World War II—are presented and analyzed with a view to assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each explanation. Through the use of qualitative research methods (i.e., the congruence method and testing of observable implications) and the development of new numeric measurements to capture the depth of intelligence cooperation over time, the author finds that the normative dyadic democratic peace hypothesis and its posited causal mechanism of the regime recognition dynamic are largely corroborated in both cases, thus suggesting that they warrant further consideration as an explanation of the depth of bilateral intelligence cooperation. By contrast, the relational contracting hypothesis and its posited causal mechanism of willful hierarchy are not well supported in either case, thus raising questions about their applicability and generalizability to the larger universe of cases. BILATERAL INTELLIGENCE COOPERATION: THEORY DEVELOPMENT WITHIN THE ‘MISSING DIMENSION’ OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS By Ryan E. Bock Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor George Quester, Chair Professor Scott Kastner Professor Peter Mallios Professor William Nolte Professor Vladimir Tismăneanu © Copyright by Ryan E. Bock 2012 Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to: • Greta, whose steady patience, unconditional love and quiet encouragement have sustained me throughout this undertaking. • Eliot, whose questions and curiosity about the world around him have provided a constant reminder of why I set out to do this in the first place. • Gillian, whose compassion and concern for my well-being (“Why is Daddy so sleepy?”) have helped to put this endeavor into a proper perspective. ii Acknowledgements I wish to thank Professor Miranda Schreurs for providing multiple rounds of early and detailed feedback on a qualitative methods research design (a class project) that ultimately evolved into this dissertation. In addition, I wish to thank Dr. Michael Warner, Dr. Derek Reveron and Professor James Igoe Walsh for their insightful comments and helpful guidance on earlier versions of this work. Their collective knowledge of International Relations theory and modern intelligence history—and rare abilities to connect the two together—was an inspiration to me throughout this endeavor. I also wish to thank Bob O’Hara and the skilled research team of Public Record Searches for their prompt and professional handling of my requests for scanned copies of public documents from the UK National Archives. Thanks to them, I was able to spend a significantly greater proportion of my time reading and analyzing archival documents back here in the States. Last but not least, I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee— Professors George Quester (Chair), Vladimir Tismăneanu, Scott Kastner, Bill Nolte and Peter Mallios—for their willingness and flexibility to work with me on this project. Of course, any remaining faults, omissions or errors are purely my own. iii Table of Contents Dedication..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements......................................................................................................iii Table of Contents......................................................................................................... iv List of Tables .............................................................................................................. vii List of Figures............................................................................................................viii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1: Introduction................................................................................................. 1 What’s missing in the ‘missing dimension’ of international politics?...................... 1 Research question ..................................................................................................... 3 Structure and implications ........................................................................................ 5 Terms of Reference................................................................................................... 7 Intelligence............................................................................................................ 7 Bilateral intelligence cooperation ......................................................................... 8 Democracy and autocracy................................................................................... 11 Transaction costs................................................................................................. 15 Anticipated challenges and obstacles...................................................................... 18 Outline and structure of study................................................................................. 19 Chapter 2: Intelligence Studies Literature Review ..................................................... 22 IR and the neglected colony of Intelligence Studies............................................... 22 Obstacles surrounding the theorization and academic study of intelligence .......... 24 Why theorize about intelligence?........................................................................ 24 Why IR and Intelligence Studies haven’t mixed well (yet)................................ 28 Assessing the sub-literature on international intelligence cooperation................... 35 Historical contributions....................................................................................... 35 Practitioner contributions.................................................................................... 37 Political science contributions ............................................................................ 44 An analytic framework ........................................................................................... 48 Chapter 3: Theory and Method................................................................................... 51 The dyadic democratic peace argument.................................................................. 51 Structuralist arguments ....................................................................................... 53 Normative arguments.......................................................................................... 56 Hypothesis........................................................................................................... 64 The relational contracting argument ....................................................................... 67 Origins within the economics literature.............................................................. 68 Weber’s anarchic argument ................................................................................ 71 Walsh’s willful hierarchy argument.................................................................... 73 Hypothesis........................................................................................................... 75 Methodology........................................................................................................... 77 Research objectives............................................................................................. 77 Case selection criteria ......................................................................................... 79 Data availability...................................................................................................... 84 Testing and measurement ....................................................................................... 85 Testing procedures.............................................................................................. 85 iv Measuring the dependent variable .....................................................................